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ADDRESS 



DELIVERED AT THE 



UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, 



THE SOCIETY OF THE ALUMNI, 



THE OCCASION OF THEIR 



ANNUAL CELEBRATION, NOVEMBER 15th, 1852; 



THE REV. GEORGE POTTS, D.D. 



PHILADELPHIA: 
PRINTED BY KING & BAIRD. 

1853. 



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CORRESPONDENCE. 



University of Pennsylvania, 
Philadelphia, Dec. 23, 1852. 
Dear Sir : 

At a Stated Meeting of the Board of Managers of the Society of the Alumni of 
the University of Pennsylvania, we were unanimously appointed a Committee to 
communicate to you the thanks of the Society, for the very able, instructive, and 
eloquent address, which you delivered before them, on their recent Anniversary, 
and to solicit from you a copy of it for publication. 

In communicating this resolution, and indulging the hope that you will comply 
with the wishes of the Society, allow us, ourselves, to express the great gratification 
we enjoyed on the occasion, enhanced as it was, by the pleasure of welcoming your 
visit from a distant City to the scene of your early collegiate T?ssociations, and our 
own. 

With great respect, very truly and faithfully yours, 

Henry D. Gilpin, 

W. R. WlSTER, 

J. M. Collins, 
Charles Burgin, 
H. D. Gregory. 
To the Rev. George Potts, D.D. 



New York, February Ikth, 1853. 
Gentlemen : 

I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter, on behalf of the Society of the 
Alumni, and in compliance with their request, place my Address at your disposal. 

Very respectfully yours, 

George Potts. 

To Messrs. Henry D. Gilpin, W. R. Wister, J. M. Collins, 
Charles Burgin, H. D. Gregory, Committee. 



ADDRESS, 

Gentlemen : 

It is not without deep sensibility that I find myself 
here to day : in my native city, among the memorials 
of my boyhood, and joining you in the duty of bringing 
your annual tribute of grateful recollections to our com- 
mon Alma Mater. In the honor you have done me in 
appointing me to so large a share in the festivities of 
your anniversary, two of my respected classmates of 
1819,* have preceded me. I find in these coincidences 
an augury of hope for myself, that you are predisposed 
to regard with favor the remarks I have to make — and 
they also revive into something of youthful freshness, 
the remembrance of those early days when all the 
members of that class were still growing, side by side, in 
this nursery of learning; manly lads, I must say, with 
a very fair share of ardor, but no mean rivalries, in the 
pursuit of improvement. Some of us have been removed 
to distant places, and some have gone, I hope, to the 
better land. Some have reached posts of distinction 
and usefulness, and of those who survive, I feel that 
it may be asserted with truth, that they will yield to 
no other class in affectionate recollection of their Alma 
Mater. You will pardon me for this passing tribute, 

* The Hon. R. J. Walker, and the Hon. Henry D. Gilpin. 



t) ADDRESS. 

in which I am sure my ancient friends will join me, to 
the by-gone days of our college course. 

Like the attachments of birth place, family, and 
country — the feelings which rally us to-daj^ find their 
roots struck deep in the soil of the past. In all our 
best qualities, our highest interests, our keenest enjoy- 
ments — we can easily trace the signs of derivation, and 
therefore of dependance, and therefore of obligation, to 
sources now out of sight. There is much proud talk, 
indeed, in certain quarters, of self-made men ; but, in 
any case, the man who claims the title, shows that in 
the process of self making, he has omitted the elements 
— good sense and modesty. No man, however great 
the inherent energy of his nature, or however eminent 
his merits, or however numerous the disadvantages 
over which he has triumphed, has a right to overlook 
the fact that, after all, he owes much the larger share 
of his attainments and usefulness to ancestral labors, 
which smoothed the way for him, and started him in 
his career with an inherited capital. He should re- 
member the schools, however poor, the books, however 
few, the teachers, however imperfectly qualified, the 
companionship, however immature, all of which in an 
important degree were like the flint to his steel, with- 
out which there would have been no sparks because no 
collision — or the whet-stone to his tool, without which 
the tool could not have been sharpened. No, even if 
in respect to the least meritorious of his acquirements — 
his money — a man cannot with strict truth be said to 



ADDRESS. 7 

be self-made — much less can he secure the treasure of 
knowledge, unless by drawing upon the accumulations 
of predecessors. Just as every *river, though it be a 
broad and fertilizing " father of waters," must derive 
its drops from distant head-springs, and its alluvion from 
the deposites of the past. 

In this grand fact, that the Maker of all has myste- 
riously and beautifully constituted human beings in 
dependant generations linked together, and not in iso- 
lated creations, each of which must struggle by itself 
out of infancy into maturity, each be left to get what 
he can without aid from the past, as well as without 
power to make the future the heirs of his attainments ; 
in this grand fact, I say, we not only have the reasons 
for a becoming modesty, in regard to our highest at- 
tainments, but it is the noble source of the grateful 
recollections which have brought us together to day. 
It is good to refresh our feelings of dependance upon 
that humble germ planted here more than a century 
ago, — a venerable antiquity for America — whose living 
sap has imparted a portion of its vitality to successive 
seeds, which have been borne by the winds of provi- 
dence to the favorable spots where they have struck 
root and nourished. Whatever the fruitfulness of the 
shoots, their genealogy, so to speak, ought never to be 
ignored by the stateliest of them all, with supercilious 
ingratitude. Filial impiety, whether its object be a 
literal or figurative parent, is one of the most disgusting 
diseases of our nature, and should be banned among us. 



a : : ?. z ^ 5 . 



We believe with a great statesman and philosopher, 
that a people who do not look backward with appro- 
priate feelings to their ancestors, will not look forward 
:; their posterity." vT r -- loyal scholars: we do not 
believe in repudiation of debts of any kind, least of all 
iebts to the disinterested benefactors, the founders, 
care-takers, and teachers of our university. It is one 
of the purposes of this anniversary to recall, in imagi- 
nation, the first meeting of the few 3 Franklin at their 
head, who in 1743, Je sired to see a broad foundation 
laid for an institution of learning. How much, closely 
affecting our interests, was involved in those first con- 
ferences ; in the financial struggle ; in the adjustment of 
prejudices and preferences ; in the resolute perseverance 
required to avert or resist the jealousies of some, the 
ignorance of others, the parsimony of others,, and the 
indifference (the true h v: Je st to be overcome) 

of others, before even a humble beginning could be made 
\rrying out their purpose of establishing an insti- 
ll, which (to use their own admirable language) 
"through the blessing of God, and the bounty and 
u patronage of pious and well disposed persons, might 
u be of great and lasting benefit to the present and 
'•'future generations?" And coming down to 
periods — is there one here, who can be insensible to 
the claims of the several administrations by which the 
actions of our Alma Mater have been dispensed : 
one who does not recal the friendly faces of his personal 
ome of whom are no longer among the 



ADDRESS. y 

living : one who does not feel ashamed, if he ever vexed 
them with his boyish trifling : one who is not pleased 
in remembering the gratification which glistened in 
their eyes at every evidence of his improvement under 
their instructions ? Excellent and venerable men ! 
We look back and wonder at your forbearance and 
patience, and now that the conceited presumption of 
youth is gone by, we could wish you were here to 
receive the grateful testimony of our humbler maturity, 
which, with a better appreciation of your services, 
vents itself in hearty expressions of sorrow that we 
did not more thoroughly profit by your teaching and 
example. Many buffe tings from the rude hand of 
experience would they have saved us. 

Their places are now held by others. Those of us, 
who find that the period of a generation has passed 
since they left the noble halls of this university, and 
who have, like myself, been all that time exiles from 
their birth-place, will know the present guides of this 
institution only by the fame of a well earned reputa- 
tion. But this does not lessen the peculiar feelings 
with which we rejoice to hear of her well-doing. The 
institution of learning has the same mysterious kind 
of identity as the other great organisms of society, the 
family, the church, the state, a "permanent body com- 
posed of transitory parts ;" and whatever the changes 
of its transitory parts, its successive epochs will call 
forth a continuous interest in its teachers, and pupils, 
and in the manner in which they perform their duties 



10 ADDRESS. 

Especially to those ancients, who are on the ground, 
the present and prospective condition of this university 
will be a subject of deep concern. I heartily echo the 
very true and able remarks of one of my predecessors 
on this occasion, when he lays the responsibility of pro- 
tecting and strengthening the University of Pennsyl- 
vania, mainly at the door of her Philadelphia alumni. 
They must keep her in mind, cheer her efforts, en- 
courage her teachers, endow her with gifts, for her 
professorships, her library, her scientific furniture: 
they must be loyal to her by standing by each other's 
fame and usefulness. And they must stimulate her 
scholars by their presence at those examinations and 
public exercises where the fledglings are pluming and 
trying their wings. They must have praise ready for 
the worthy competitors in the stadium, and to the 
faithful trainers they must be able and ready to clo all 
honor. They must feel that their interest in her may 
be well suspected, when they will not demonstrate it 
by the sacrifice of an occasional hour or even day upon 
her altars. I cannot be mistaken — no one who koks 
back upon his college days can be mistaken, in laying 
a great stress upon the effect of such a demonstrative 
interest on the part of the alumni, on the great festive 
occasions of the institution. Thus has the esprit du 
corps of our most successful colleges been fostered, 
until now, every successive class which goes from them 
is sure that its struggles and triumphs are witnessed 
with a sincere interest by their predecessors. Colleges 



ADDRESS. 11 

— as well as many other great associations — are kept 
up to the point of lively activity, by the confidence 
and sympathy, especially of those who have enjoyed 
their advantages. All successful developement requires 
an outer as well as an inner force, and in this instance 
one of the outer forces is the steady, earnest, dutiful 
countenance which the intelligent give to the places of 
their mental culture, and the interest they continue to 
manifest by actual attendance on her successive festal 
occasions. For instance — -and I cite the instance to 
illustrate the purport of these remarks — should the 
great occasion of Commencement be largely attended, 
not merely by the parents, sisters, and friends of the 
graduating class, but by the cultivated scholars who 
have won for themselves a place of honor in society, 
the effect of their presence would be powerfully felt as 
a stimulus and a reward to the efforts of both faculty 
and student. It would go far to establish and give 
power to the noble and wide spread influence which is 
the glory of a seat of learning. Coming forth under 
the eyes of competent judges, they would all aim at a 
thorough preparation. We are tempted, I know, — we 
are all tempted to be " laudatores temporis acti ;" but 
even though we admit that this inclination partakes of 
an altogether affectionate character, that it has no min- 
gling of contracted self-conceit in it, no one has rightly 
read the lessons of human duty, taught him in the past, 
who forgets the present and the future ; because in a 
generous mind, a truly affectionate remembrance of its 



12 ADDRESS. 

co-temporaries in the past, will keep alive a strong sym- 
pathy in the new generation who occupy their places. 
We do not wish any one to forget his first putting on the 
toga virilis, the college gown; the first composition ; the 
first speech from the rostrum ; the first immense access 
of self-respect, when mistered by a Professor ; or any of 
the other steps in the long series which led him up to 
manly self-reliance ? The smile with which we now 
greet the recollection of these grand events of the 
college era, will not be one of contempt, for all of them 
exercised an influence as powerful at the time, as those 
other grand exercises — the first triumph at the bar, the 
first cure of a patient, the first election to office, the 
first feat of authorship. They were the incitements to 
continued effort, and the earnests of success. Shall 
the remembrance of these early foot-races, be obliterated 
by the sterner conflicts of life ? No ! let not the veteran 
of the old guard despise the new conscript; for the his- 
tory of the one, will, in all substantial respects, be the 
history of the other, and he ought to have all the aid 
which the veteran's manifestation of interest and sym- 
pathy can give him. 

So much notice, gentlemen, you will allow to the 
recollections of the old times, and the suggestion of 
some of the minor duties we owe to the present and 
coming generations of teachers and taught, who are to 
occupy, successively, the care of this nursing mother. 
I have felt some embarrassment in the selection of a 
single topic which, without wearisome prolixity or 



ADDRESS. 13 

triteness, might profitably occupy the remainder of the 
time devoted to this exercise. Those who have been 
honored with the call of the various alumni associations 
of our institutions of learning for the last dozen years, 
have well nigh exhausted the subjects suitable for 
such occasions. The praises of Literature and Science — 
the characteristics of the various systems of learning, 
and the improvements that may be made in them — 
the claims of classical studies, assailed by those who 
deem them unsuited to this so-called practical age — 
the extension of education to the masses, and its rela- 
tions to social progress; these and kindred themes 
have been well-nigh exhausted. Wishing to make 
the most, in my humble way, of the opportunity of 
addressing so many cultivated minds, to whom the 
state looks for the influences which are to mould and 
guide her, I would regard your invitation, not simply 
as conferring a pleasure and an honor, but as imposing 
a duty, to the discharge of which I should bring the 
best qualities I possess. I beg you to remember, that 
of the numerous ministers of religion who have gone 
forth from our alma mater, I am the first whom you have 
appointed to this occasion. I trust, therefore, that you 
will agree with me that I ought not to overlook the 
relation which we, and our common mother, bear to 
the supreme subjects which have occupied the larger 
share of my thoughts. That you will not, I am led to 
believe from the fact which I mention with unspeakable 
satisfaction, that every one of my predecessors has, in 



14 ADDRESS. 

emphatic language, expressed his conviction that our 
parent college is and ought to be Christian in its 
teachings and general influence : that the grand 
authority of the word of God should be recognized in 
its instructions and discipline. To these, gentlemen, 
I owe my theme. Without professional cant, or sec- 
tarian dogmatism, but from the stand-point of our 
common Christianity, I beg to lay before you, in an 
informal manner, some remarks on 

The social conservatism of our Colleges and Seminaries 
of Learning. 
If any one should ask me to define the familiar 
term — Conservatism — I might say that its origin, 
within our own recollection, implies that there is 
something which society is in danger of losing, and 
which ought to be rescued from the hands of men 
eager for change. But, added to this essential thought 
is now another, which is also included in the word, 
namely, the correction of what is evil in the condition 
and action of society. Conservatism is not a mere 
negation, but a positive force ; it not only proposes to 
guard what is valuable, but to reform what is mis- 
chievous. It is in this double sense that we shall 
employ the term. We believe that it is desirable the 
vessel should move as fast as is consistent with safety, 
and that to do this, she needs a good suit of canvass 
well trimmed, and a good hand at the tiller, as well 
as sufficient ballast ; we believe, indeed, that the latter 
without the former, will settle her in the trough of the 



ADDRESS. 15 

sea and sink her : so, if conservatism be the exercise of 
the power of standing still, it must perish in its 
stupidity. We repudiate the " let alone" policy which 
teaches that there can be no change which will not 
mar more than it mends. We devoutly believe — it is 
a part of our religion to believe — that there is and 
ought to be an agitation which is desirable — change 
which is useful— progress which is improvement. And 
further, and notwithstanding the tiresome fulsomeness 
with which our age is bepraised, as the age of progress 
par eminence, we wish to be distinctly understood as 
accepting its claims in some valuable respects. But 
not only do I avowedly number myself among those 
stupid people who think that the extent of our advances 
upon former ages is greatly over-estimated, and that 
much of it, as some one has wittily said, has been like 
that military movement called mark time, in which 
there is more noise than advance — but worse than this 
— -I think that the value of these advances has been still 
more exaggerated. If many things ought to be changed, 
still all change is not improvement ; whatever is new 
is not necessarily good and true. I like action, but 
not violent uncontrolled action, and reform, but not 
reform which pulls down every thing before it will 
build any thing. In short, the conservatism for which 
I plead, recognizes the great primary law, that what- 
ever activity is given, even to those forces which are 
intended to affect society favorably, is liable to dangers 
similar to those which attend all powerful excitement 



16 ADDRESS. 

on the individual. It may overrun the point of health, 
and become wild and delirious — it may get beyond the 
control of the balance wheel and the breaks, and (you 
will pardon the triteness of the comparison for the sake 
of its fitness,) it may drag the train so fast along the 
curves, as to throw it off at a tangent. This would be 
progress, but in the wrong direction. Catastrophes, of 
which this is a faint analogy, await society with its 
valuable freight of high, civil and moral interests, 
unless care be taken to provide it with a good road in 
the first place, and then with prudent and temperate 
engineers, in whose view safety is as important a con- 
sideration as sneed. Thev must be. in one sense of 

JL J * 

the word, conservative ; they must know their busi- 
ness and attend to it ; they must watch the road, the 
machine, the fuel, and then, (and this I am simple 
enough to regard as the final cause of all contrivances 
for locomotion,) then they will take care of the pas- 
sengers, and bring them to their journey's end without 
crushing some and endangering all. 

But the general question now presents itself, whether, 
in the period in which we live, any causes are at work, 
which create a special necessity for the negative or 
positive action of such a conservatism as that which 
has been just defined? Are there special tendencies 
or actual evils which excite the solicitude or demand 
the energies of the loyal Christian scholar, who, by the 
very force of those terms is a patriot and philanthropist? 
Or — for this may be a question with some — is the 



ADDRESS. 17 

character of society settled by causes, is it subject to 
a motion, which are beyond our influence ? Has it a 
destiny, in short, which it must reach by an inexorable 
necessity, and the attempt to forward or retard which, 
would be a weak presumption on our part. 

To take the last of these questions first — because, 
where the fatalism which underlies it exists in any 
mind, our interest in the character of our cotemporaries 
and successors, must be one of mere curious but help- 
less anxiety, instead of a deep personal responsibility ; 
and beget the selfish inertia which has so often robbed 
society of powers that, if well employed, might have 
proved of value. Not even in the midst of the greatest 
social obliquities are men entitled to succumb without 
an effort to ward off the evil ; and specially detestable 
is the frivolous desperation, which determines to sport 
to the last, even with the mutterings of approaching 
earthquakes in its ears ; dancing and smiling, and 
making the prospective evil the subject of epigrammatic 
wit, as it says, — " After us, the deluge." We hold 
then, that the motion of society, though rapid and 
complicated, is always in a high degree an intelligent 
and voluntary motion, capable of being brought under 
the application of moral laws and powers. It is only 
in a partial degree that the character of society is 
determined by forces out of our reach. As a general 
law, divinely established, national, and social, and per- 
sonal peculiarities are often transmitted for generations 
together ; a fact which satisfies us that all social 



18 ADDRESS. 

changes are so slow in their movement as to take them 
out of the domain of fatalities which can neither be 
helped nor hindered, and place them among results for 
which the actors in them are, each in his degree, 
responsible. We talk of sudden revolutions ; but no 
revolution, though its crisis may arrive with a startling 
vehemence which astonishes the unobservant, is in 
fact, without a long preparatory stage. It began when 
the reptiles, too weak to scale the walls, burrowed 
beneath the foundations of the citadel. It began when 
the first drops of acid were deposited on the steel 
which no directly applied force could break. All the 
great catastrophes of the world were the harvests of a 
previous seed time. Human agencies were their 
parents. The word and providence of God assure us 
of the fact, that each successive generation must of 
necessity, and according as it obeys or violates the 
eternal laws of obligation, be employed not only in 
receiving but in giving those successive impulses which 
bear the nations upward from a rude barbarism, or 
downward from a lofty civilization. It is upon their 
capacity of learning from the experience of by-gone 
generations that our hope of the improvement of the 
race depends ; it is this which distinguishes the move- 
ments of man from those of the lower creations. The 
bird builds its nest and the beaver its dam skilfully, 
but no more skilfully now than they did a thousand 
years ago. 

Bat enough upon a point which I hope requires no 



ADDRESS. 19 

further pleading among a band of scholars, who cannot 
be blind to the general lesson which the philosophy of 
history teaches, — namely, that national progress and 
decline have intelligible and controllable social causes, 
for the power of which, and often for their very exis- 
tence, individuals are accountable. The question now 
returns on us, what special tendencies exist at the 
present time which ought to call forth the positive and 
negative conservatism of every loyal christian institu- 
tion of learning, and every loyal christian scholar who 
loves his country and his race with an intelligent affec- 
tion ? In maintaining that there are such tendencies, I 
do not wish to side with either of the two parties who 
are engaged, the one in disparaging, the other in 
extravagantly eulogising the age, as it is called. I think 
that substantially, it is very much like previous ages — 
having like them its good, bad, and indifferent charac- 
teristics. Truth, as usual, lies between the boasters 
who glorify it, and the alarmists who asperse it. If we 
have gained on " the wisdom of our ancestors" in some 
things, we have lost much in others. The world has 
not reached just yet the acme, but has much to learn, 
much to reform, much to counteract ; and quite as 
much of humility as of pride ought to follow from our 
comparison between the present and the past. Even 
in that which is perhaps the most legitimate and pecu- 
liar praise of the age — I mean its improvement in 
physical science and discovery as applied to mechanism 
— it is well to recollect that the ancients knew and 



20 ADDRESS. 

could do many things in this field almost as well as 
we can. Even the motive powers of our day, gigantic as 
they are, might stand respectfully in the presence of those 
lost powers which raised the Pyramids and the other 
structures of antiquity. Researches amidst the ruins of 
Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, and Roman, even of Chinese 
and Hindoo civilization, tell us that many arts once 
known to them, are now unknown to us, and that 
others which we claim as of modern discovery, were 
also used among them : a pregnant fact, in whatever 
light we view it. Only the other day, Sir David Brew- 
ster exhibited a plano-concave lens found in exploring 
the ruins of Ninevah. In the fine arts, statuary and 
architecture especially, we are but copyists of an excel- 
lence yet unsurpassed. In poetry, eloquence, and even 
speculative philosophy, their great men are models for 
all future time. We ara but editors of their works, 
with now and then an improvement.* Yes, — and it 
should be one of the objects of our scholarly conserva- 
tism, to make the braggarts of this practical age, this 
age of progress, know and feel this, that if in some 
things we stand high, it is because we stand upon the 
shoulders of our predecessors, while in other things we 
have not reached their knees : that our most luxuriant 
vegetation owes much of its splendour, and certainly its 
life, to the accumulated soil of centuries silently bestow- 

* Although with a sagacious writer of the last century, we may believe and 
say " the wombe of time bringeth forth many new truths :" it is even more 
largely true to say with the same writer, " Time but putteth new robes on old 
truths." — Rutherford. 



ADDRESS. 21 

ing its juices upon the unconscious and ungrateful 
growths of the present. 

But on the other hand, our modern croakers and 
alarmists may also gather a lesson from a comparison 
of past and present. If it teaches boasters to be modest, 
it administers some comfort to those who see nothing 
but the dark lining of the cloud, and who look upon 
the agitations and changes of society, present and pro- 
spective, as proofs that the world is rushing into "chaos 
and old night." Let them know that the world has 
weathered even greater storms. True : gigantic and 
perilous doctrines are taught : for as some one has said, 
" though errors die, error is immortal." It has indeed 
a strange periodicity and reproductiveness. Both specu- 
lative and practical errors move in a cycle ; like eclipses 
you can almost foretell when they will occur, and how 
much they will darken the truth. We are now called 
to do battle with the same sophisms which employed 
the wits of Socrates and Plato, and of the noble souls 
of later times, who, out of the purer philosophy of 
Christianity, have forged still more effectual weapons 
for the overthrow of materializing scepticism. Our ora- 
tors are using the same weapons which Demosthenes, 
Cicero, and other masters of eloquence wielded. Our 
social reformers and political charlatans, our quacks and 
dupes, our knaves and fools, our Dives rolling in luxury, 
our paupers rotting at his gate, what are they but 
substantial reproductions of the types which are 
described in the records of Thucidydes, Tacitus, Livy, 



22 ADDRESS. 

Moses, David, Solomon, and other worthies of history, 
sacred and profane. The prodigies of superstition, 
which are at this moment drawing upon the rich fund 
of dupery, which the ignorant supply and which the 
knaves know how to use, are matched by similar prodi- 
gies of imposition of a former age. The pirates which 
prey upon the world, are dressed in the cast-off clothes 
of their predecessors : their weapons are the same — the 
same preposterous schemes for the reform of the world, 
the same reliance upon a mere change in the physical 
conditions of humanity, the same stale arguments 
against spiritualism, the same malignity peeping out of 
the cloak of reason and philanthropy, which marked 
Bishop Berkeley's times, and the era of the French 
encyclopaedists, and the same family likeness among 
their offspring. And finally — to show the substantial 
identity of different and distant eras — let us hear a 
modern describe a certain class of the youth of our day, 
" They would quiz their father and mother, and lover 
and friend. They discuss sun and planets, liberty and 
fate, love and death, over the soup. They never 
sleep, go nowhere, stay nowhere, eat nothing, and 
know nobody, but are up to anything, were it the 
Genesis of nature, or the last cataclasm — Festus-like, 
Faust-like, Jove-like — and could write an Iliad any 
rainy morning, if fame were not such a bore. Men, 
women, though the greatest and fairest, are stupid 
things, but a rifle and a mild gunpowder, a spaniel and 
a segar, are themes for Olympus." Now hear good 



ADDRESS. 23 

Pliny describe the Roman youth of his time — " Earum 
hoc in adolescentibus nostris : nam quoties quisque vel 
setati ulterius vel auctoritati, ut minor cedit ? Statim 
sapiunt : statim sciunt omnia : neminem verentur : 
imitantur neminem : atque ipsi sibi exempla sunt." 
How like the two pictures in the great outlines of 
human nature under similar conditions ! 

It were easy to multiply these resemblances. But 
interesting as it would be to pursue this study of com- 
parative history, (as worthy of attention as compara- 
tive anatomy in its way,) we must be satisfied with 
this general statement of the facts — for the sake of the 
most important inference which it yields, namely, that 
it is a gross error to imagine that society has ahvays been 
moving forward in a straight line of progress, each suc- 
cessive age being a positive advance upon its predeces- 
sors : and notwithstanding vicissitudes, notwithstanding 
the eddies and ebullitions of the stream, inherent and 
resistless laws of its own are carrying it into wider and 
smoother channels. That it has no such inherent laws, 
which of necessity secure a higher and higher develope- 
ment,the facts we have given prove conclusively. Now 
if you ask me whether such a developement may not 
be secured, and whether it ought not to be the concern 
of every age that it should be secured : I answer, truly 
it should : truly it is the shame and guilt of mankind 
that it is not so. Nor can a true philosophy and a 
true religion be content till this " travelling the circuit" 
of error, this running off into vagaries, this loss of gains, 



24 ADDRESS. 

this reproduction of follies and crimes shall be arrested. 
We want the high road of life improved — so that all 
who journey on through the nights and days of time 
can travel upon its capacious bosom with an increasing 
intelligence, safety, and comfort. And it is to the 
removal of obstructions now to be found in this grand 
highway, that every learned institution, and every 
cultivated man should lend all his energies. 

Turn now to a survey of some of the hindrances to 
the highest social developement, which a practical chris- 
tian conservatism commends to our men of culture. I 
notice only those which are specially characteristics of 
the age, and which are of importance only as they 
foment disturbance and promote the morbid social action 
which insome form belongs to every age. 

In the first place then, we need to do all we can to 
conjure into calmness the unquiet spirit of the times, whose 
excitements amount in many respects to disease. If we 
seek for the source of the excitement, I think we must 
admit that it has been indirectly called into activity by 
the improvements in mechanical contrivances, those 
especially which are applied to labor and locomotion. 
They have had the perceptible effect not only of ma- 
terializing the mind of society, by obtruding material 
interests upon the attention, as the grand interests, but 
of exasperating the activity of the world, into something 
very like fury. Time has been virtually lengthened, 
space has been virtually shortened, wealth and physical 
comfort promoted, but when as the grand result, we 



ADDRESS. 25 

had a right to look for leisure, and the repose and 
reflectiveness which leisure is supposed to give, an 
opposite result presents itself. Notwithstanding the 
hours which science and labor-saving ingenuity have 
added to the term of life, instead of lessening toil and 
increasing opportunities of inward culture, is it not a 
fact that time is more than ever crowded with exciting 
demands upon toil ? Life is more toil-worn than ever, 
and countenances more haggard from the excited hurry 
which is necessary to overtake one's day's work. Do we 
set off upon our travels, it is true we move fast, so fast 
that we cannot read the inscription on the mile measure, 
but we are disturbed at the recollection that the speed 
is dearly bought — and that pushing, burning, scalding, 
crushing, drowning, have come to be the five categories 
of modern locomotion. As to the day laborer, while 
the steam-engine has spared one set of muscles, it has 
wearied another ; and because more work can be done, 
more is demanded, and the cry from the steam-press, 
the steam-vessel, the steam-car, the steam-factory, the 
magnetic wires, is give, give ! Our horse-leech has not 
two, but many daughters. 

Added to this, the same cause is increasing the dis- 
turbed action of society by giving a vast momentum to 
remote influences, which come trooping in, one after 
another, without intermission. The universal world 
is at our door every morning. Instead of ceremonious 
visits, when after quiet intervals of a month or two, 
some lumbering vessel brought the news, now we have 



26 ADDRESS. 

daily, almost hourly notices of all the movements of 
London, Paris, and other neighbours poured into our 
ears. Besides that, many, invited by the facilities for 
locomotion, quit their quiet anchoring ground in search 
of the exciting pleasures of the luxurious old world, 
and return with reluctance to the tameness of a home- 
life ; great masses of human beings, with new impulses, 
and in search of new destinies, are in motion, and sea 
and land are crowded with the caravans, portending a 
fusion, mayhap a confusion of the nations ; since the 
irruptions of the Northern tribes upon the fertile regions 
of the Roman empire, and the crusades which filled 
Asia with the sweepings of Europe, the world has seen 
nothing like it. Novelty succeeds novelty in the de- 
partment of scientific invention and discovery; plan 
succeeds plan for extending commerce; the door of 
China, (and next it may be of Japan,) is battered in, 
to let in opium and European civilization, and to 
let out the pent-up myriads, thousands of whom 
(and who can forecast the bearings of the fact ?) 
are crowding to our shores. Territory is conquered 
or coveted: lands unknown awhile since, reveal by 
accident the mineral treasures which all men covet, 
and draw excited thousands from every quarter: 
revolutions flare up, and though smothered, none can 
tell when they will flare up again : despotisms are con- 
verted into republics without ceremony, and republics 
are reconverted in a marvellously short time into despo- 
tisms of the most flagrant sort : yesterday every body 



ADDRESS. 27 

was allowed to speak and propound the most disorgan- 
izing changes for society — to-day nobody is permitted 
to speak unless after an established model. All these, 
and more occurrences like them, are keeping the world 
at the top of its speed — and men ask what will come 
next ? The world is out of breath : its big heart is 
beating, its big brain is reeling. 

Physicians tell us that the best use which they can 
imagine for the organ called the spleen — and the pur- 
pose of which is still a matter of guess — is to act as a 
waste-gate to the system, by drawing from the blood 
vessels a portion of their contents, when the man is 
under some powerful excitement, and in this way 
relieve the brain. Does not society need some such 
organ to save it from the peril of congestion ? When 
shock succeeds shock so rapidly, where is the sedative 
which will avert delirium, or what is equally evil, the 
lethargic indifference which nothing can interest except 
the occurrence of some marvel greater than those which 
have added to its powers? It is a serious symptom, 
when a nil admirari" becomes the universal motto — 
and to this, it seems to me, there is a great danger of 
our reaching, seeing that it is already becoming tire- 
some to hear of the strange feats and strange move- 
ments which are only a few years old. In the way of 
mechanical novelties, what would be more than a nine 
days' wonder? There are hundreds among us who 
would scarcely walk to Fairmount to see a man fly. 

In such a state of incessant disturbance from with- 



28 ADDRESS. 

out, we need some composing influence within; we 
need some lapis Lydius that will put these things to a 
sound and sufficient test — and where shall we find it ? 

Gentlemen, it lies in the conservative power of those 
high truths which teach the world that, whatever attrac- 
tions life and even its purest and nobler pursuits, namely 
those of science and learning, have, they are truly 
small when compared with the boundless attractions 
which belong to the higher department of our nature, 
and that the noblest condition of society is one over all 
the engagements of which shall preside a profound re- 
gard to those motive principles which affect its moral 
well-being. It is not to the Pulpit alone that the 
elucidation and enforcing of these principles should be 
left. The part which the religious organisms of our 
day are striving to perform, by carrying these principles 
into the homes of the land, must after all depend for 
success upon something which necessarily affects them 
all. I mean the Institutions of learning, where the 
first systematic impressions are made upon the intel- 
lectual character of that class of minds who may be 
expected to lead society by the force of their superior 
knowledge. From them must come the statesmen and 
authors, the professional men and journalists ; the lat- 
ter already wielding a vast power ; who are to give 
tone to the public mind ? Hence their responsibility, 
and here, their real dignity and glory. 

Not to dwell upon the tranquilizing effect of a wise 
exertion of their influence in respect to the mere culti- 



ADDRESS. 29 

vation of the thinking faculty — and the mere communi- 
cation of knowledge as such — they are called upon to do 
much more than this as conservators of society, by 
giving a right direction to the faculties they are engaged 
in cultivating and developing. Highly as we respect 
attainments in knowledge of any kind, highly as we 
regard the investigations of science in the departments 
of physics or metaphysics, we should be not only sorry 
to see any department of it so cultivated as to make it 
an end instead of a means ; but especially sorry to see 
it pursued in such a manner as to concentrate the main 
attention upon the material, and not the moral rela- 
tions of mankind. It has been said of a mere meta- 
physician, who deals only with the dry abstractions of 
mental science, that he is 

One to whose smooth-rubbed soul can cling 

No form, nor feeling, great or small ; 
A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, 

An intellectual all in all. 

But is not this equally true of the mere linguist, the 
mere rhetorician, the mere astronomer, geologist, chem- 
ist, or mathematician ? One-sided culture is always bad, 
and has been happily compared to the statues in a frieze, 
finished on one side, jagged aud unsightly on the other. 
If we must have only one side finished, let it be that 
which includes the most important features and limbs. 
And what are these ? What qualities of the body politic 
could be best parted with — those which are now throw- 
ing social life into a ferment — those which add to the 



SO ADDRESS. 

already impetuous tendency of the age to think and 
act in view of a material prosperity — those which make 
a rich, luxurious, polished, or conquering people — or 
those which go to form the honest man, the good 
parent and child, the faithful husband and wife, the 
active philanthropist, the just judge and lawgiver? 
Could not society dispense with all the other sciences 
more safely than with that noblest science — duty ? 
The world cannot get on without that, whereas it might 
answer all the highest ends of social organization, even 
if we were not carried through space fifty miles an 
hour — and could not send word in a few minutes to 
New Orleans, that cotton had risen a farthing in the 
pound at Liverpool. It is by these things, and things 
like these, the results of a highly stimulated mechani- 
cal and scientific ingenuity, that the restless spirit of the 
age is kept excited. We see the effect already upon 
the youth of the land, yet in their teens, who are so 
early in life drawn into the vortex, that they are 
scarcely allowed time to get a smattering of mental and 
moral science ; so that there is an increasing multitude 
of them who know almost nothing about almost every- 
thing, and who understand every thing without, better 
than they do the microcosm loithin. There are too 
many now sent adrift in early life upon the rolling sea 
of business, with money in their eye, and without 
the ballast of discipline and high moral principle, which 
can only be secured by an attentive and thorough 
study of the moral powers and laws of their spiritual 



ADDRESS. 31 

being. Will it be "wonderful that what of ballast they 
have, will be treated as one treats the ballast of the 
balloon — thrown overboard when they find that it 
prevents them from rising ? " Kem ! quocumque modo 
rem ;" this must needs be the reigning adage, should 
material prosperity become the general idol, the touch- 
stone of values, the measure of time and talent, as 
there is danger of its becoming. Charming results of 
scientific invention, when its clever discoveries shall 
be mainly applied to finding the materials for a golden 
calf, and building roads and cars by which the mad- 
dened pilgrims may be carried to the shrine to dance 
round it ! 

Here lies a large field for educators. They must 
resist with a wise and steady firmness the tendency 
manifest in many quarters to furnish an education, 
which under the pretence of giving a practical training 
— 'practical indeed ! — stimulates the quickened blood, 
instead of lifting the soul into the calm regions of spirit- 
ual thought, where it may find a rational composure 
which it needs now more than ever. No education 
which stops short of this — which ignores this — much 
more, wmich openly or by indirection impugns this — 
which treats the human creation as a mere bundle of 
sensations — which obtrudes into the highest place the 
physical sciences, which have so arrogantly claimed as 
exclusively their own, the titles of positive and practi- 
cal ; no education, which on the ground that all are not 
agreed in religion shall exclude a distinctive Chris- 



6'A ADDRESS. 

tianity and teach nothing that will shock even the 
delicate nerves of atheism ; no education, however 
polished it may be, which does this, can fail ultimately 
to sharpen the tools and strengthen the arms of social 
evil, and help men to become adepts in what one may 
well call " the sublime mechanics of depravity." The 
question of a popular education, and education for the 
masses, is one of unspeakable moment : and no one 
who has watched the current of discussion which it has 
created, can have failed to notice that the materializing 
philosophism of the clay is not without hopes of making 
such a popular system the medium of diffusing its 
peculiar principles. Beginning in negations, it will first 
of all quietly aim to substitute in the place of a morality 
which draws its impulses, laws and sanctions from the 
word of God, that inert morality (we call it by the 
gentlest name) which rests its power upon a mere 
expediency and present utility ; an exchan? - >f granite 
rock for shifting mud. And what must be the con- 
sequence, if the drift of educational training shall be to 
teach the }~outh of our land that all knowledge which 
bears upon their spiritual nature, their duty and 
destiny, is unworthy of concern, and impractical, be- 
cause it will not help to build a ship, work a farm or a 
steam-mill, or heal a broken leg ? Yet such teaching 
falls in only too well with the tendency of the unquiet 
spirit of the age. Ah ! were it possible to simply drop 
the knowledge of God and moral law out of the catalogue 
of human sciences, the evils would be enormous, but 



ADDRESS. 33 

not so immediately destructive to the texture of society. 
But no such merely negative position is possible. Man 
has a heart, and if it be not prepossessed with good, it 
will be with evil. There are places in that heart 
which cannot be filled by any material science, and 
which if not filled by a positive morality, will be by 
a positive immorality, which will ultimately break the 
cobweb restraints of mere expediency, and end in a 
series of frauds, violences, and sensualities, such as the 
worst of superstitions never engendered. 

You will not do me the injustice of imagining that 
any disparagement of the achievements of physical 
science is intended in the preceding remarks ; or any 
belief that they are necessarily antagonistic to the cul- 
tivation of our higher nature and relations; or any 
questioning of their possibly beneficial though indirect 
effects upon the moral conditions of society. I object 
only to thgip supremacy ; I hold only that they are 
not " the top and crown " of acquirement. I plead 
only that our institutions of learning, and especially our 
venerable alma mater, shall train men — whole-souled 
full-orbed men — all whose sides in turn behold the sun. 
Then they will prove conservative in the highest sense. 
Then the tracks, along which steam and electricity are 
now the carriers of the commodities of commerce, may 
carry also ideas and their influences, and we may have 
occasion to be grateful for the quickness and cheapness 
of the conveyance without fearing that the flying 
thought will only serve to hasten the dissolution of 
society. Then we shall see motion without commotion 



34 ADDRESS. 

— order without stagnation — energy without phrenzy. 
Then shall all the greater and lesser orbs of our social 
world resemble those which, in the mighty heavens, 
reveal the power of a grand central attraction, rapidly 
and ceaselessly moving on, but in such a divine har- 
mony that they seem to lie in beautiful repose on the 
bosom of immensity. Then shall progress be a sus- 
tained advance, like the "reposing motion" of the 
eagle ; 

"Ye cannot see the stirring of his wings, 
And yet he soars." 

Poor Eichard — a name you will reverence, ye Phila- 
delphians ! as the name of a wise observer — hated 
noise, confusion and hurry. One of his quaint sayings, 
is this — "the worst wheel of the cart is the most 
noisy." The din we hear around us reminds a reflec- 
tive man of the worst wheel of the cart. 

Let me now invite you to turn in another direction, 
and you will discover additional necessity for the con- 
servative christian influence of our seminaries of learn- 
ing. I have already referred to it, but it deserves a 
more special notice than the time which usage has 
allotted to this discourse will permit. I refer to the 
antagonism which, it is affirmed by some, exists between 
the cardinal truths of religion and the results of modern 
scientific investigation. Such an alleged antagonism 
has always afforded a malignant satisfaction to those 
who are predisposed to hail every plausible appearance 
of contradiction between the works and the word of 



ADDRESS. 35 

God ; and in our own times, we find this class holding 
a jubilee over every new discovery of natural laws, as 
if the very penetralia of being were about to be laid 
bare, the eternity and inherent capability of material 
forces demonstrated, the soul proved to be a secretion, 
a personal and intelligent maker of all a needless fiction 
of priestcraft, and of course personal responsibility to 
moral law shorn of its disturbing power. 

Pity for the schemers and contempt for their dreams 
will mingle with the smile which crosses the face of 
a true christian philosophy, at the thought that the 
wonderful ingenuity which has" invented the boat 
machine, the spinning machine, and the road machine, 
can with equal ease put the human soul, with its spi- 
ritual and mechanical powers, upon wheels, and shape 
its opinions and govern its motions, as if it were a lump 
of iron, which, put into one end of the machine crude, 
comes forth from the other, a perfect horse-shoe. 

I have heard expectations of the kind I have before 
mentioned, avowed, and they form the substance of the 
pantheistic materialism of much so-called philosophy, 
w T hich has made its appearance on the stage, in the 
patched robes of Spinoza and the earlier philosophers 
of the Greek and Hindoo schools, and whose material 
godhead was long ago described by iEschylus. 

Zsv$ iotlv at Orjp 
Zsv$ t?s yrj 
Zev$ $£ ovpavb$ 

It has been asked whether there is anything in the 



36 ADDRESS. 

nature of the physical sciences, or in the modes in 
which they have been investigated, that tends to, and 
encourages this materialism ? Not in their nature ; for 
the obvious reason that many, and those among the 
most eminent of the scholars of natural science, have 
altogether escaped any such tendency. The names of 
Ouvier, Davy, Herschel, Buckland, Brewster, Owen, 
Miller, not to speak of a host of others, furnish conclu- 
sive proofs that faith and science are natural friends, 
not natural foes : twin sisters of congenial dispositions 
and aims. But when men devote themselves to such a 
dealing with matter and its organic forms and laws, as 
to leave no room for a study of the other departments 
of knowledge, it is in the nature of things that they will 
become, first indifferent and then sceptical as to every 
thing which cannot be weighed in the scales, dissected 
with the knife, or put to some other experimentum 
crucis, and this has often been the result of one- 
sided investigations. One who wishes to see the philo- 
sophy of this phenomenon, this madness of " undevout" 
science, satisfactorily laid open, will only need to study 
the profound observations of Whewell on this point, in 
his work on the inductive sciences. 

With such a tendency of certain schools to material- 
ism, and of course to a rejection of all supernatural 
religious and moral science — it is the part of our chris- 
tian institutions and their scholars to employ them- 
selves in making an ample and scientific examination 
of the theories of the day, with a view of exposing the 
presumptuous fallacies, correcting the alleged facts, and 



ADDRESS. 37 

thus .check the hasty generalizations which have made 
the history of natural science too much a history of 
short-lived theories, each of which has lasted only long 
enough to strangle its predecessor. It cannot be denied 
that many have donned the robes of science, and spoken 
in her name, with an ex-cathedra air which shows that 
dogmatism, any more than hypocrisy, is not confined 
to the church. Lord Bacon's " idols of the understand- 
ing'' are still the objects of worship in certain temples 
of science. They are " hasty assent," " hasty generali- 
zation," and " the abandoning universality :" and in 
proportion as these idols are worshipped, will the fault- 
less image of truth be forsaken. To the calm, patient? 
cautious man of science, who labors with genial ardor 
in his favorite study, without insisting that it alone de- 
serves the regards of mankind, — to one who weighs 
well his facts, and refuses to draw from partial data 
inferences which a larger view of facts will falsify, — to 
such a one (and many such our own university has 
furnished to the ranks of medicine and the natural 
sciences) a profound reverence is due. Those who 
regard the book of nature as that " elder scripture writ 
by God's own hand," will owe a debt of gratitude to 
him who, by tracing the magical combinations of natural 
elements and forces, will enlarge and elevate their sen- 
timents of reverence for the grand "maker of them all." 
We not only have no jealousy of his researches, but 
will gladly and confidently accompany such an one 
into the deep mines of nature, because he carries with 
him the safety lamp of modesty and truth; the 



38 ADDRESS. 

fire-damps are dangerous only to the presumptuous 
explorer. 

That there are such explorers — that there is much 
pretentious sciolism, which is not so ignorant as it is 
dishonest, which is ready to falsify, or pervert, or sup- 
press the sacred facts of science, rather than not build 
up a theory by which they may secure the praise of 
originality and profundity — cannot be doubted. You 
will recall an example of such sciolism in a late theory 
of developement, which, whatever be the professed 
intentions of the author, not only struck directly at 
the authority of revelation, but at the very being of 
God — by endowing material atoms with self-inherent 
forces, capable, during a long succession of ages, of de- 
veloping themselves from the lowest into the highest 
organisms. This was literally " science, falsely so 
called." For when honest and intelligent investigators 
came forth to expose the fallacies of the " vestiges of 
creation," it was shown that its alleged facts were 
unscientific falsehoods, its cases of spontaneous genera- 
tion, from the acarus Crossii to the mould on the musty 
bread, assumptions which were unsupported by demon- 
strative evidence, and contradicted by all the natural 
analogies — and its supposed order of developement of 
the higher from the lower organisms, falsified by the 
organic remains in the geological strata. And yet the 
smooth style, and ingenious inventions of this work of 
romance, intended for popular effect, have given to it a 
still continued popularity ; edition after edition, in the 
country of its birth, attesting the impression it has 



ADDRESS. 39 

made on the shallow curiosity of the public mind, and 
confirming the fact already exemplified in ten thousand 
cases — that there are many who like the logic of infi- 
delity so well because it is the logic of infidelity, that 
they have no disposition to inquire whether any and 
what refutation it has met with. 

This is but one instance of many which the annals 
of natural science afford, and in which a weapon in- 
tended to demolish the adamant gates of moral and 
religious truth, has broken in the hands that held it. 
Within my own recollection, the French savans who 
accompanied Napoleon into Egypt, discovered in the 
ruined Egyptian temple of Dendera, a stone sculptured 
with zodiacal signs, and which they introduced into the 
scientific world, with a flourish of trumpets, first as an 
undoubted relic of a remote Egyptian antiquity, and 
then as an astronomic proof that the world was of an 
indefinite antiquity, thus giving the lie to the Mosaic 
chronology. Subsequent examination by others proved 
the sculpture to be of Roman origin, and that mighty 
hieroglyphic stone of Dendera, which was to have crushed 
the Mosaic history, and of consequence, the Christian, 
now reposes quietly in the Bibliotheque Eoyale of Paris, 
where I have seen it — and there is not even a French 
infidel " so poor as to do it reverence." 

Notwithstanding its defeats, it is a mortifying, but 
significant fact, that science, falsely so called, is not yet 
tired of pitting its strength against the doctrine of an 
intelligent cause. It has gone so far as to assume the 
broad ground, that science cannot admit any design to 



40 ADDRESS. 

be apparent in the phenomenal universe, that is, any 
final cause or end for which any thing was formed. 
This theory, which seemed to be effectually demolished 
by Cuvier in his controversy with St. Hilaire, has again 
been virtually revived by the great generalizer of our 
day, Comte, who takes the position, that all questions 
of the supernatural origin and ends of the phenomenal 
universe, shall be left among those inscrutable mysteries 
with which science has nothing to do ; a theory this, 
which in the very act of making so extravagant a de- 
mand upon the abnegation of the human mind, as the 
demand that it shall stop short at the most momentous 
point of its inductions, betrays the consciousness of the 
weakness of scientific materialism, and its inconsistency 
with the tendency and drift of scientific facts, and thus 
affords promise of the final settlement of all points in 
dispute between science and revelation, in favor of the 
divine records. 

Already has the tendency to such a settlement made 
its appearance in several directions. Thus the nebular 
hypothesis of La Place, intended as it was to explain 
creation without a creator, and to make the elements 
and forces of it eternal ; besides asserting the fact of 
vast changes, indicating an astonishing instability in 
the career of the planetary universe, and thus over- 
turning the preceding theory of astronomy, namely, 
that the revolutions of the planetary system were so 
even and regular that they bore every indication of an 
eternal duration and durability — beside this, this theory 
includes the once-scouted doctrine that light existed 



ADDRESS. 41 

before the Sun, and the outer before the inner orbs of 
the system ; in both these points harmonizing with the 
Mosaic account. Geology too, though too often in the 
hands of investigators who, if they have no enmity, 
certainly have no partiality for the scripture history of 
nature, has, in several important respects, overturned 
the old doctrine of the eternal and invariable order of 
nature, as it was called, and corroborated the Mosaic 
account of the recent origin of man. The theories of 
this science have been so often abandoned or modified, 
so many of its phenomena, the existence of limestone 
and coal, for example, have found such contradictory 
explanations, its reputed facts, have so often been 
exposed as mistakes, and its researches, when compared 
with the extent of the surface and depth of the globe, 
have been as yet so partial, that there is reason to 
believe that a more complete collection and comparison 
of data will thoroughly disprove the now common 
assumption, that the changes which have passed over 
the earth have required unnumbered myriads of ages 
to bring them about ; an assumption which, for one, I 
do not believe to be necessary to account for the phe- 
nomena, and which, it appears tome, can only be made 
to harmonize with the scripture cosmogony by a very 
pliable system of interpretation. So too, in regard to 
the records of History, which have undergone a very 
searching investigation in our day, its great authorities 
and discoveries have, as you all know, confirmed the 
sacred history, in a wonderful manner. Chronology 
too, after patronizing the Chinese and Hindoo anti- 



42 ADDRESS. 

quities, which put back the co mm en cement of the 
historical era to a point much earlier than that assigned 
by the Mosaic records, has now discarded the preten- 
sions of China and Hindostan, and set up the superior 
claim of the Egyptian ; Lepsius and Bunsen, of our 
day, being their interpreters. But on the other hand, 
the investigations of Mr. Poole of England, into the 
sculptures of the Memnonium at Thebes, confirmed by 
the highest British authority, Professor Airy of the 
Greenwich Observatory, have eone far to establish 
the accuracy of scripture chronology. In like manner, 
the comparison of languages, and the study of the 
races of men, under the auspices of ethnological inves- 
tigations, are in the same direction, tending to establish 
the fact, of one common source for the great human 
family, a fact called in question by some naturalists, and 
as stoutly maintained by others of equal authority, who 
side with the plain teachings of the scripture records. 
I have thus rapidly sketched the general relations 
which science now holds to the great moral and re- 
ligious elements which enter so deeply into the very 
heart of social life, because so far as it still presents 
itself in an attitude of opposition to the authority of 
our religious institutes, it deserves the closest attention 
of our scats of Christian learning. It has a vast moral 
and social significance. The day was, when sceptical 
speculation was comparatively harmless, by the fact of 
its being limited to the few. But science has been 
popularized, the intense curiosity of a multitude of 
readers has been awakened by the field of thought thus 



ADDRESS. 43 

newly opened to them, and whatever profit or injury 
can be done by scientific investigations, must be shared 
in by the general public. With such facilities for 
spreading its power, our learned institutions and our 
cultivated men, who Value, as a necessity, the social 
influences of religious truth, must confront the danger 
with which society has been threatened from this 
cause — by a faithful and able examination of scientific 
facts and theories, and by clearly exposing the fallacy 
of hasty generalizations whenever they occur in a form 
and from a source calculated to do mischief. In doing 
this, they will prove conservative at once of science 
and society. 

Nor ought they to disdain to give a proper degree of 
attention to certain so-called sciences, which though 
they may have some elements of truth in them, are left 
so much in the hands of empirics and credulous dupes, 
that it requires great labor to winnow the few grains 
of wheat from the chaff. Our intelligent guides must 
interest themselves in a rigid examination of their 
claims, because they connect themselves with questions 
in psychological science, and because, as now handled, 
they are unsettling the faith of multitudes in the grand 
elemental truths of politics and science, as well as 
religion and morals. When it comes to be believed 
that men are what they are, by reason of a physical 
organization subject only to irresistible physical forces, 
(and this has been the drift of phrenological teachings) 
it must be obvious that the whole basis and frame-work 
of society must be removed, and an irresponsible ma- 



4-i ADDRESS. 

terialism established. Or. if by a new sort of insight 
which despises the old laws and limitations of know- 
ledge, we may look into the brain to tell its thoughts : 
into the stomach to tell its diseases ; into distant re- 
gions to tell what is going on there ; it is clear that 
your books and tools of learning may be given to the 
fire. And especially if the venerable Franklin may be 
called from the other world to teach your classes, [though 
it be in bad English.) how to correct the mistakes he 
made in his favorite science ; and Sir Isaac Xewton to 
inform them that his ideas of the law of gravitation 
were blunders ; I see no reason why the chairs of our 
faculties of science, law and medicine — of course all 
theological chairs — may not be vacated, and lectures 
given through the new medium of rappings. The 
demons are not dead, but visible and invisible, are 
doins: mischief in everv direction, and our common 
schools, our colleges, are not safe from their intrusion. 
One drift is to be perceived about all these new dis- 
coveries; it is the tendency to the disturbance of 
society, by the creation of a demand for changes in its 
radical conditions and laws, which shall comport with 
these alleged discoveries. The mention of this fact leads 
me to close my remarks by asking your patience while 
I advert more particularly to this result of the influ- 
ences which I have been laying before vou. I allude 
to questions of social reform. If the excitements of 
the public mind by the several causes we have noted, 
were excitements of curiosity in search of amusement 
and relaxation, they might disturb the surface without 



ADDRESS. 45 

reaching the deep places of life. But they all point in 
the direction of changes in its fundamental conditions. 
Reform is the watchword. How far the term should 
be changed and revolution substituted, may be deter- 
mined by looking at what has been proposed, and in 
part accomplished in certain quarters ; at principles 
and acts which illustrate each other. A running 
notice is all we shall attempt. 

Starting from the acknowledged truth that there is 
room for improvement in the state of mankind, they 
diverge from the path of a Christian philanthropy, not 
only in their ideal of a perfect social state, but in the 
measures which they consider necessary to remove our 
burdens and destroy our vices. Let us judge what 
their idea is by the plans of reform they propose. 
When analyzed, these may be said to consist in a total 
change in the relations of property and family. The 
rights and obligations of property, of marriage, of the 
parental and filial relations, are to be so essentially 
altered as to be in fact destroyed : mere community of 
property is not the most essential feature of the new 
social economy, but, in spite of the attempts to disguise 
the thing under a flimsy gauze of words ; a community 
in other respects deeply affecting the interests of per- 
sonal and social purity. The change in the relation 
of the sexes and of parents and children, if indeed the 
system when carried out can be said to recognize pa- 
rentage at all, is radical, and must needs obliterate a 
large class of sentiments and duties which are now 



46 ADDRESS. 

enjoined as normal, not only by the statutes of Scrip- 
ture, but by all previously existing civil codes. 

In any other than this unquiet age such propositions 
would not be regarded sane. But absurd as they are, 
it is worthy of observation, that even among those who 
refuse to be called Socialists or Fourierites — the reason- 
ings on which these theories are based — the promi- 
nence they give to mere material interests — their 
assaults upon the principles and laws which now regu- 
late society — their views of marriage, and the family 
relations — their attacks upon the Christian revelation, 
which is the most effectual breakwater they have to 
encounter, have loosened both the notions and prac- 
tices of many unreflecting or fanatical minds. Writers, 
and lecturers, and prints which disclaim the name, 
and in some respects object to the plans of socialistic 
reform, are nevertheless playing into the hands of these 
revolutionary theorists, and helping forward their expe- 
riments upon the texture of society. Crotchety they 
may be called, and so they are, but when it is remem- 
bered that such an organization as they propose has 
temptations of different sorts to proffer to different 
classes — an equalization of property to one — a freedom 
from the restraints of marriage to another — an easy 
and irresponsible life to another — these crotchets are 
not without peril. Without the least apprehension 
that such theories, warring as they do upon the very 
axioms of social existence, could have an ultimate 
general success ; they may loosen the joints of society 



ADDRESS. 47 

in certain places, and lead to hurtful experiments upon 
our civil and political institutions. The rights of 
labor ; the right of a man to a living from society ; the 
right to a portion of the world's surface; the oppres- 
sions of labor by capital ; have been already pressed 
with taking eloquence by political aspirants. " Yote 
yourself a farm " is one of the recognized formulas, and 
anti-rentism is a flower from this stem. Hatred to 
what is above it, in intelligence, wealth, or position, is 
its stimulus. Its very aim is to create class-jealousies 
by sordid appeals to sordid prejudices. 

When in the convulsive efforts of 1848, in Europe, 
the really oppressed nations struck a blow for liberty, 
the disciples of these theories proved far more nume- 
rous than was supposed, and mingling in the strife, 
frightened away from her standards the more rational 
friends of liberty, who were not willing to fight even 
her battles in such company. We have the testimony 
of the noble Mazzini, that the element of socialism in 
the late contests, and not the bayonets of despotism, 
is responsible for the fearful reaction which has taken 
place ; nor is it to be wondered at, for despotic gov- 
ernment has a saving clause of which socialistic 
anarchy is destitute. We too would prefer it as the 
lesser evil. 

If any further argument against these theories 'of 
modern reform were necessary, it is found in the fact, 
that generally they are sworn allies with the material- 
ism and anti-Christianity which is now the less to be 
dreaded, because it has adopted the jargon of a senti- 



48 ADDRESS. 

mental pantheism, and smatters, in its mystical way, of 
the soul of humanity, of the immortality of man, and 
of God. God in nature, God in history, God in society. 
What sort of God ? Hear one who seems to have 
examined it with a keen eye — Mazzini.* It talks of God 
without feeling Him; of Jesus Christ while dressing 
Him in the robes of Bentham ; of immortality while con- 
fining it to earth ; of European solidarity while making 
Paris the brain of the world ; commenting under one 
guise or another, exclusively, on the dogma of physical 
icell-being, in the style of Volney and Bentham. We 
are not to be cheated by its professions of liberty, fra- 
ternity, equality. Its liberty is dyed with human 
blood. Its philanthropy is that of Robespierre, who 
proposed to abolish the death-penalty ; of his compeer, 
who with bloody hands reared pet doves ; and of the 
female citizens who took their knitting and gossipped 
on the steps of the guillotine, while they waited for the 
tumbril and its daily load of human victims. At that 
pregnant chapter in the history of infidel reform, we 
can only glance, but a glance may read the lessons 
written there. We have received many valuable 
things from the old world, but God save us from the 
importations of Pantheistic Atheism, which springing 
from the brains of so-called philosophers, has been dis- 
tilled into the uneducated mass, and which, I have 
reason to believe, infects a large number of those who 
from Germany and elsewhere, are crowding to our 
shores. They have their books and journals, in which 

* "Westminster Review, April, 1852. 



ADDRESS. 49 

both our Christianity and our political conservatism 
are blasphemously assailed. Combining themselves 
with the intense individualism, which in all ages chafes 
at the most reasonable restraints, and which derives a 
vast momentum from the really large measure of 
liberty of speech and action guarantied by our politi- 
cal institutions ; taking advantage also of the shallow 
smattering and real ignorance, which in spite of the 
schoolmaster are to be found in our land, and of the 
other materializing tendencies we have elsewhere spoken 
of, these schemes of reform are not to be despised as 
incapable of mischief. Thousands have already been 
their dupes and victims, for while they believed they 
were about to be relieved of their fetters, they were in 
fact stripped of their garments. The caustic comparison 
of Burke, intended for the French reformers of 1789, 
applies to these " children who are ready to hack 
their aged parent ' society' into pieces, and put him 
into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their 
poisonous weeds and wild incantations, they may re- 
generate the paternal constitution, and renovate their 
parent's life." 

These, and kindred " root and branch " systems of 
revolutions, furnish a proper field for the conservative 
influence of Christian philosophy at our centres of 
learning. Inasmuch as the problems of society are 
not abstractions or novelties ; are not to be reasoned a 
priori but a posteriori', are not to be solved by any 
logic but that of experience, the field of history (which 

forms one of the parts of every course of liberal educa- 

4 



50 ADDRESS. 

tion) must supply the materials for refuting and de- 
nouncing these and all similar empirical schemes. We 
must look to our literary guides to fetch the great light, 
experience, from the stern to the prow of the ship, for 
we need it to shine upon the course we are to go, not 
the course we have gone over. It must be shown, as it 
can be, that the rejection of the religious element, even 
where it existed only in perverted forms, has always 
been attended by demoralization, and has made the 
course of government a series of reactions and collapses, 
ending in final disorganization. With such material 
facts ancient literature abounds, and in this lies one of 
the most conclusive arguments for the encouragement 
of that classical learning to which we are indebted for 
the preservation and exposition of its ancient records. 
Bat more than this. We must justly look to our 
seats of learning, to show, and this too is capable of 
historic demonstration, that when we trace the currents 
and cross-currents of the historic life of our race, the 
most clearly marked line of social progress, is coinci- 
dent with the line of the Christian Faith. Not to 
dwell upon the fact, that this Faith affirms the possibility 
not only, but the prophetic certainty of progress ; it 
alone suggests its true conditions, and furnishes the 
requisite impulses. You will not require me to enlarge 
upon these — but it is enough to point out the fact that 
just in the degree, and wherever these forces have had 
free access to the centres of human action, a palpable 
advance in knowledge, liberty, and a pure refinement, 
has been perceptible ; and the poverty, injustice, op 



ADDRESS. 51 

pression, and licentiousness, which are the ulcers of a 
depraved society, have precisely in that degree been 
checked and healed. The broad current of its influ- 
ence is to be traced through the latitudes of time, like 
that great gulf stream which washes our shores. 
Storms have often beat upon its surface, that have 
seemed to turn it backward, and even obliterate for a 
time the traces of its existence, but it has flowed on. 
The current of Christian civilization has already out- 
lasted every other. Those of Assyria, Egypt, Greece, 
and Rome have been swallowed up in the sands of 
time, and whatever of their waters have been pre- 
served, have been absorbed by the power of this civili- 
zation. At the present moment, society is strictly 
speaking in progress, only in this line. Chinese and 
Hindoo, and Mohammedan civilization have for ages 
been, to say the least, stationary. The nations that 
have crossed the influence of the great Christian ideas, 
displacing them by puerile substitutes — Italy and Spain 
for example — have lost their impulse, and fallen from 
the front to the rear rank, in knowledge, liberty and 
purity. Surely these are impressive facts, which prove 
that of all that is practical in an age that boasts of 
being practical, these principles are the most practical, 
because they furnish the propulsive yet centripetal 
force which carries all else forward in harmony toward 
the ideal perfection ; and because they show us how 
and where to lay down the assymptote to a curve 
otherwise unapproachable. 

Gentlemen, when I claim these results in behalf of 



52 ADDRESS. 

Christianity, I am speaking for the inherent tendency 
of her grand principles, and the facts and institutes 
which are the vehicles of those principles. It is not 
upon an effete formal religion that we can rely for 
conservative, yet reformatory power. Upon no mut- 
tered or counted prayers, no dramatic worship of pride 
or terror, no ostentatious pharisaism of a sect, no 
enchantments, do we rely for its power to inform and 
control beneficially the individual or public life — but 
upon principles. Were I to undertake to enumerate 
these principles, I might be suspected of forgetting that 
I am on the platform and not in the pulpit, and that I 
have already taxed your patience long enough. Nor 
is it necessary I should do so, because I feel assured 
that these evangelic elements are easily discriminated 
from all the effete negations which have often assumed 
their name, and attempted the exorcism of social life 
in vain. They form the credenda and agenda of all 
the great Christian communions, which, however they 
diverge in minor respects, agree in considering the 
cross — not the cross as a symbol, not the cross sculptured 
in stone or embroidered in gold, not the cross of the 
herald, the inquisitor or crusader, but the cross as the 
witness to God's divine love and justice, and man's 
deliverance from a miserable bondage, as the centre 
of all social harmonies, the true philosophy of all social 
reform ; because it affirms the possibility, supplies the 
motives, arid suggests the means for realizing the ulti- 
mate triumph of good over evil. This is the power 
which alone can remove the stone from the grave of 



ADDRESS. 53 

our still buried humanity, and thus prepare for the 
final act, Eesurrection. 

The aggregate influence of the scholarly men who 
have gone forth from the school to occupy places in 
the commonwealth, must necessarily be great. But 
that it may be good as well as great, we must look to 
those who have the training of them. The professional 
character ought to be as sound morally as intellectually, 
illustrating that noble union, mind and heart equally 
cultivated. Thus far in the history of our university, 
beginning with its first provost down to the venerable 
Wylie, the last of its extended corps who has left the 
world, full of years, and crowned with the honors of a 
useful and benevolent life, the general influence of its 
instructors has been salutary ; they have, in the main, 
been eminent and excellent, for they have recognized 
the authority of those grand truths of which I have 
spoken. Should it ever be otherwise — should our 
institution ever divorce physical and moral science, 
and much more, place them in antagonism, teaching in 
one lecture room what is assailed openly or by indi- 
rection in another — in a word, should it ever cease to 
be Christian, in its classics, its mathematics, its cos- 
mogony, chronology, and history ; in its medicine and 
jurisprudence ; in its literature, and above all its ethics, 
its malign influence will be in proportion as its 
academic chairs are filled with ability. It will be a 
destroyer, not a builder of the social temple. 

Our hope that this may never be so, is quickened by 
the repute in which its present instructors are held. 



54: ADDRESS. 

How noble the theatre for their learned influence ! 
How fair the opportunity of making their mark upon 
the country ! What glorious inducements to work and 
work well, are held out in the prospective career of 
the nation ! Voices from the graves where repose the 
mighty dead; among them noble patriots, statesmen, 
philanthropists and scholars, who once trod these 
streets, and shared in the culture of our alma mater, 
are heard cheering them on, and inviting us to stand 
by them while they employ their plastic skill in 
shaping the young republic ! When they make honest 
men they will do this most effectually, for honesty is 
the grand necessity of the world, at this time, in its 
science as well as its commerce, in its politics as well 
as its theology. Its source is to be found in the heaven- 
illumined knowledge which shines upon all the human 
relations. Of all the methods of government, the one 
we have adopted depends more than any other upon 
this, for its very possibility ; for here the governed are 
the governors, the subjects of law are the law-givers. 
The freedom they have claimed for themselves, though 
great, is not too great, if greatly used. To use it 
greatly, its owners must be qualified, and (in the noble 
words of Burke,) they are qualified for freedom " in 
"exact proportion to their disposition to put moral 
" chains upon their ' appetites ; in proportion as their 
"love of justice is above their rapacity ; in proportion 
" as their soundness and sobriety of judgment is above 
" their vanity and presumption ; in proportion as they 
" are more disposed to listen to the council of the wise 



ADDRESS. 55 

"and good than to the flattery of knaves. Society 
" cannot exist unless a controlling power upon appetite 
" and will be placed somewhere ; and the less there is 
" without, the more they need within. It is ordained 
" in the eternal constitution of things, that men of 
" intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions 
"forge their fetters." 

To these fundamental truths we must often recur, 
lest in the excitements which rise from the abundance 
of our external advantages, great beyond precedent, 
and which have already called forth not as much loyal 
love of country and more of a boasting vanity than is 
creditable — we should forget that all sound prosperity 
is but the flowering of these principles, and must perish 
when they become forgotten. May our alma mater, 
who has already sent forth many noble exemplars and 
expounders of them, continue to consecrate all her 
resources to their propagation and enforcement. True 
learning can have no higher aims. She has not always 
remembered it. "Learning," to use the words of 
Bacon, "has had many peccant humors." With his 
marvellous sagacity he enumerates some of them, and 
closes the catalogue in words which I will quote as the 
conclusion of the discourse to which you have listened 
with a patience for which, gentlemen, I thank you. 

" The greatest error of all the rest, is the mistaking 
" or misplacing of the last or furthest end of knowledge ; 
"for men have entered into a desire of learning and 
" knowledge sometimes upon a natural curiosity and 
" inquisitive appetite : sometimes to entertain their 



56 ADDRESS. 

" minds with variety and delight : sometimes for orna- 
" ment and reputation : sometimes to enable them to 
" victory of wit and contradiction : and most times for 
" lucre and profession. Seldom sincerely, to give a 
" true account of their gift of reason to the benefit and 
" use of men. As if there were sought in knowledge 
u a couch whereon to rest a searching and restless 
"spirit; or a terrace for a wandering and variable 
" mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect : or 
" a tower of state for a proud mind to raise itself upon : 
" or a fort or commanding ground, for strife and con- 
" tention : or a shop for profit or sale : and not a rich 
"storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the relief 
"of man's estate. But this is that which will indeed 
" dignify and exalt knowledge, if contemplation and 
" action may be more nearly and straitly conjoined 
" than they have been. As both heaven and earth do 
" conspire and contribute to the use and benefit of 
" man, so the end ought to be, from both philosophies, 
" to separate and reject vain speculations, and to pre- 
" serve and augment whatever is solid and fruitful." 



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